"Jean," said he, solemnly, "you remember how proudly I boasted to you when Congress prohibited that blackest disgrace of our army, the liquor-selling canteen. You know how deeply I felt the shame and disgrace upon the whole legal profession when an officer of the cabinet perpetrated the outrage that thwarted the will of the sovereign people. Jean, girl, in a long life of close contact with the nation's politics I have never met anything that has so deeply tried my loyalty to the party in which I have helped to work out the political problems of almost half a century as did that act that, as a life-long student of law, I recognized as a fraud.
"But I have bolstered my shattered faith in the party with my absolute confidence in the President. I have refused to believe—to this very hour I have refused to believe that the man whose magnificent career I have watched with such interest and of whose stainless honor I have been so proud, would consent to be a party to such an act of anarchy. I have insisted, as you well know, stoutly holding my position though the long delay has made me sick at heart, that when the long routine of official red tape had at length unrolled itself and the case should finally come to the President, justice would be done and the nation's honor vindicated.
"Now, look there!"
And with hands that trembled with suppressed anger the old jurist unfolded the crumpled paper, which Jean had recovered, and pointed out the telegraphic report that told how another high official of the President's official family had disgraced himself, his profession and the administration by the formal declaration that he accepted the historic Griggs infamy as a correct interpretation of law.
"Jean, my child, spare me. Say nothing now, child. I can not bear it. The faith of a lifetime is shattered. On that page I read, plainly as if it were printed there, that the President is a party to the infamy. The party of my lifelong loyalty stands committed by the act of its chosen leaders to the foulest anarchy that ever disgraced a civilized people. Had I no thought for temperance, as a citizen and as a lawyer, I could not otherwise than see in this the forerunner of the gravest national disaster."
The young woman listened with an expression in which deepest scorn for the treason done was mingled with tender pity for the stricken man at her side. Sharp, cutting words crowded to her lips for a final argument, but her love for her father checked them.
Just then, in the silence, a step was heard approaching the house. In a twinkling the canteen outrage slipped from the mind of the girl, for the step was one whose echo had made indelible prints on her heart and whose owner she had been many times heartsick to see.
She had hardly time to wonder what brought him at an hour long past the usual time for making calls before he was with them.